Saturday, 24 October 2009

I was just wondering where next year's Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts conference was going to be next year - sadly I missed the Dublin conference this year as I had a friend's wedding in the diary so didnt hear the announcement about 2010 - but it surprised me I couldnt find the DRH website anywhere.

My mug from DRH 99 clearly says the URL is http://www.drh.org.uk/. Jump to the link to see where that takes you now.

Sigh. When the Digital Humanities community cant do something like renew a domain name....

I would ping the secretary to tell them, but I dont know who it is, as the website is down.

And if anyone knows where DRHA 2010 will be, and when, let me know.

Update; Lou Burnard (who is currently secretary) says DRHA 2010 will be at Brunel, London. London-tastic for the digital humanities this year!

Wednesday, 21 October 2009

One of the things I've been working on, behind the scenes, includes grant writing. I've been involved with four grants in the past two weeks. Which reminded me, today, of the brilliant work of the artist David Shrigley, who aims to articulate complicated links between things in his cartoons. This is a good map of how my brain feels just now.

Tuesday, 6 October 2009

Excellent column by David Mitchell over at the Observer regarding the madness of the proposed Research Excellent Framework and how it relates to arts and humanities research:

...this greater emphasis on making academics justify their work in terms that results-obsessed government bodies will understand is worrying.

And that's where the talk of research of social value comes in. It's a sop to the arts side. They're trying to find a way to quantify the usefulness of a greater insight into paintings, books or historical events because they know they're not of much economic value, other than to get the odd documentary commissioned, but have a vague memory of someone saying at a dinner that they mattered. They're trying to squeeze them into a plus column in their new spreadsheet of learning. Well, if that's their only way of according knowledge worth, then they're the wrong people to be making the decisions.

What separates us from the beasts, apart from fire, laughter, depression and guilt about killing the odd beast, is our curiosity. We've advanced as a species because we've wanted to find things out, regardless of whether we thought it useful. We looked at the sky and wondered what was going on – that's why, for better or worse, we've got DVD players, ventilators, nuclear weapons, global warming, poetry and cheese string. And it's for better, by the way.

The Research Excellence Framework is starting to ask what sorts of curiosity our culture can afford, and that scares me even more than the demise of the silly survey because it strikes at the heart of what it means to be civilised, to have instincts other than survival. If academic endeavour had always been vetted in advance for practicality, we wouldn't have the aeroplane or the iPhone, just a better mammoth trap.

About Melissa Terras

I'm the Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of Information Studies, University College London, and Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. I teach Digitisation, and my research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the humanities that would otherwise be impossible. My UCL webpage contains more information about publications and research projects. I also hang out at @melissaterras. This was my personal blog, and everything I said here was in a personal capacity - you can find my new blog over at melissaterras.org. I'm preserving this content to prevent bit rot, but its all replicated over the road, too - hope to see you there.